TSA accessing government and private databases to pre-screen everyone

Jetsetters, take note: According to a front page article in Tuesday’s edition of the New York Times, the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is learning much more about airline passengers than just their meal preference.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to many, but Times reporter Susan
Stellin revealed this week that the TSA has access to a trove of
huge databases — both federally and privately run — which it uses
to keep track of information about almost anyone traveling
through American airspace.

Tax identification numbers, old travel plans, property records
and even physical characteristics are contained in these
databases, Stellin wrote, which is then shared among government
agencies and often combined with other information on record
elsewhere, including intelligence maintained by the likes of debt
collectors and other private agencies whose profits depend on
digging up personal information.

This mass data-mining is being used by Department of Homeland
Security agencies like the TSA as a tool to monitor suspected
terrorists and other criminals, and could assist in an
agency-wide goal of trimming time off of the notoriously lengthy
security pat-downs currently in place at airports across the
country. But while representatives from the TSA touted these
efforts to the Times as necessary implements in ensuring utmost
safety, privacy advocates are asking for change.

According to Stellin, the TSA is now not just conducting routine
background and criminal checks on airline ticket holders, but
also relying on these massive databases to identify any potential
red flags. With computers — not humans — calling the shots,
though, it could change the face of travel to one where everyone
and everything is suspect, until the system ensures them
otherwise.

“I think the best way to look at it is as a pre-crime
assessment every time you fly,” Identity Project consultant
Edward Hasbrouck told the Times. “The default will be the
highest, most intrusive level of search, and anything less will
be conditioned on providing some additional information in some
fashion.”

Hasbrouck has previously sued the federal government in an
attempt to learn about the information that agencies like the TSA
compile on American travelers, and has long insisted that more
than meets the eye is being collected.

Earlier this month, Hasbrouck noted on the Identity Project
website that leaked security documents released to the media by
former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the
US government is accumulating information from airline
reservation systems and social media sites to scoop up
information on travelers, both domestically and abroad.

Speaking to SF Weekly in 2010, Hasbrouck equated the Automated
Targeting System started in 2006 by another DHS agency, Customs
and Border Protection, as a “guilty-by-association
machine” that can make any traveler appear suspicious since
it relies on information compiled in a “database of detailed
profiles of every person who'd crossed a US border.”

Even then, Hasbrouck said the government had access to
personalized dossiers that contained more details on travelers
than one might assume. "I've seen in one person's file that
showed not merely who they were traveling with, but ... whether
they asked for one bed or two in a hotel room, because their
hotel was booked through the same reservation as their
flight," Hasbrouck told the SF Weekly. "I don't think it's
appropriate for anyone to be looking behind your hotel room and
seeing who's sleeping with whom."

According to this week’s Times report more than three years
later, the information being collected by the TSA is only
expanding, and other government agencies are able to get their
hands on it as well.

“For instance,” Stellin wrote, “an update about the
TSA’s Transportation Security Enforcement Record System, which
contains information about travelers accused of ‘violations or
potential violations’ of security regulations, warns that the
records may be shared with ‘a debt collection agency for the
purpose of debt collection.’”

“A recent privacy notice about PreCheck notes that
fingerprints submitted by people who apply for the program will
be used by the FBI to check its unsolved crimes database,”
she said of the new expedited screening process rolled out by the
TSA at airports across the US earlier this month.

On the Identity Project website, Hasbrouck wrote that that same
system authorizes the TSA to “create a new permanent file with
everything from your fingerprints to ‘any other information
provided . . . by government agencies or other entities.”

Couple that knowledge with leaked Snowden documents suggesting
the NSA is independently accessing passenger records held by
private airlines — then handing them over to the DHS — and the
“pre-crime assessment” tools described by Hasbrouck are
that much more powerful.